True Nostalgia: PULP goes to salute
“Is this the race car music DJ?” my partner asks as I tell him we are going to salute this Friday.
A relatively innocuous joke, in reality, is an emphatic statement of the marriage between visual aesthetic, concept, and music that makes the Austrian-born, Manchester-based DJ and producer salute the dance floor tour de force they are.
Dance music is no stranger to the hybrid audio-visual concept performance, perhaps most notoriously on social media with the multi-disciplinary project Anyma, featuring NFT music videos and ‘extended reality’ performances with their residency in the Las Vegas Sphere. Yet, while Anyma may deal more in the economy of pretentious dystopian hellscapes and oversexualised wood-nymph-aliens to make up for the uninspired, derivative EDM, TRUE MAGIC achieved something else entirely.
TRUE MAGIC, salute’s cinematic audio-visual (named after their debut album of the same name), whisked us into the nostalgic world of Nintendo 64’s, cult classic Japanese Tōge racing, and arcade gaming. Entrancing crowds with their garage inspired bass lines, melodic 80’s synths were paired with the groove of French House. Set behind a huge old-school CRT television set, we danced to nostalgic 90’s ads, such as for the iconic Nissan 180 SX, dancercise videos and hypnotising animations of the album’s trademark car: a first generation Toyota MR2.
At the bottom line, salute rejected the pretension that seems to dominate much commercial dance music (read: the uninspired spoken word poetry of Fred Again). Eschewing these pseudo-philosophies of house heavy hitters, at the heart of TRUE MAGIC is a magical world of nostalgia, joy, and most of all, good old fun. Not only a testament to the varied influences upon salute’s signature sound, but the many influences that shape our first encounters with dance music. Citing the soundtracks of noughties video games Sonic Rush to FIFA Street 2 as central to TRUE MAGIC, the world of salute is one of ultra-saturated joy. After all, we can all remember that one song we discovered on a GTA radio at 12 which irrevocably transformed the trajectory of our musical tastes.
Indeed, opening with their 2021 single ‘Jennifer’, it was hard not to leave everything at the door and just dance. Warming up the crowd with their 2023 hit with Sammy Virji ‘Peach’ straight into the oscillator-heavy heartbreak anthem ‘luv stuck’ featuring fellow Mancunian piri, salute had their audience belting out every lyric. As we reached just over halfway, the riffs of ‘move faster…’ washed over the crowd; we did exactly that and turned it up to the highest gear. From start to end, salute held a masterclass in engrossing the crowd into a mass groove, reaching a euphoric conclusion with the album’s leading single ‘saving flowers’ with Rina Sawayama.
Held at Liberty Hall, one of the newest additions to Sydney’s catalogue of venues and known most notably as the home of Astral People’s Summer Dance series, the venue’s intimacy was a double-edged sword. While it was able to ensure the aural integrity of salute’s melodic grooves while delivering a formidable bass with minimal distortion, the event was clearly overbooked, making it especially challenging for those on the main dance floor to appreciate the entirety of salute’s performance. In light of the scheduling controversies and overcrowding at this summer’s event of the season, Laneway, it remains a stark reminder of the harsh realities of Sydney’s music scene. While our appetite for live music remains as insatiable as ever, the lack of funding and infrastructure has held an increasingly tighter noose on our city’s promoters and the local and international acts that grace our stages.
Nonetheless, salute’s TRUE MAGIC was a triumph both aurally and visually, that pushed against the grain to provide a simply undeniable performance. Whatever form salute’s next moves may take, there is no doubt that they have secured a clear legacy on a new generation of dance music.